I write at the end of a wonderful two week holiday with the family. I would be interested to hear from the readers of this blog as to whether any of you have ever had the following thought. When a long vacation begins I often feel like time has slowed down and that I have a seemingly limitless number of pleasure-filled days ahead of me. However, lurking behind, the fore-knowledge is already there that this holiday, like the others before it, will come to an end. As I pass the mid-point of the trip, time seems to accelerate, and I soon find myself on another airplane home. Is this not a metaphor for life itself?

I recognize how fortunate I am to be able to take a vacation with my family, and any sadness I feel at trip's end is tempered by a true sense of gratitude and privilege that we can afford such luxuries at a time when all too many parents struggle to keep a job and a home and to provide for their children. However, because up to now I have had limited vacation time away from a demanding job, the parallel between the length of a vacation and the span of a lifetime is an interesting one to me.

I see through my children's eyes and recall my own feeling that time seemed to move very slowly through life's first phases. However, little by little as responsibilities multiplied and those small aches of middle-age set in, the passage of time seemed to accelerate. The French Existentialists understood this and wrote in fiction and essay form of the way in which man's knowledge of his mortality (and the arbitrariness and absurdity of this condition) changed the nature of the arc of life toward that end.

The goal I have always pursued in my life is not to pretend that I have an infinite time on earth (or on a far lesser scale, that a nice holiday will last forever), but to not let the certainty of an ending compromise the quality of the experience in the meantime. Viewed in this way, endings are not to be feared, but rather add to the intensity of, and appreciation for, the time we have.